Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (41 page)

One remarkably deft scene also drew brickbats from Harlem critics, not on technical grounds, but once again for Micheaux's stubborn effort to write low-life characters who used the n-word. Lou Layne devoted much of his column in the
New York Age
to berating Micheaux, highlighting this offending scene, in which Brisbane forces Hawkins to scribble a note that will pin suspicion for Myrtle's murder on the factory watchman, Claudia Vance's brother. The interplay between the two characters highlighted the devious, jester side of Hawkins, who shuffles and
yassuh
s while scheming to undercut his boss.

“He tell me lie down like a night witch,” Brisbane commands Hawkins to write, telling Hawkins to add that a “Negro” did the killing. Micheaux based this exchange on one of two actual notes found near Mary Phagan's body—“the case's most enigmatic pieces of evidence,” in the words of author Steve Oney.
*
According to Conley's testimony, Leo
Frank forced his black employee to write the two notes. Micheaux had Lem Hawkins balk at the word “Negro,” because it would have sounded wrong to Conley's ears. “Four times Lovejoy made it ‘nigger,' in the last instance actually spelling the word so that there might be no mistake,” complained Layne.

Micheaux's subtle gesture of authenticity was wasted on Layne. “Perhaps the sequence was included in
Lem Hawkins' Confession
to create a laugh,” wrote Layne, “but to many who viewed the film it brought only feelings of extreme disgust.” Misinterpreting the scene, Layne chastised Micheaux for his “poor judgment.”

Once upon a time Micheaux might have been driven to respond in public. He had made a practice of showing up at newspaper offices to shake the hands of his critics, before engaging them in spirited debate. Every now and then he'd pen an open declaration and have it read out before showings of controversial productions. But he'd been wounded and scarred by his troubles in the last few years, and he knew that he'd sometimes made himself too easy a target for his enemies. In the future he'd give fewer interviews, issue no manifestos; he'd let his films and novels speak for themselves.

The best prospects for
Lem Hawkins' Confession
lay outside the East, where it was retitled
Murder in Harlem.
Micheaux and Clarence Brooks barnstormed the South, staying overnight with local theater managers in Atlanta, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis, while the Sack brothers scoured the Southwest and tried to make inroads across the Rockies.
Murder in Harlem
became the first Micheaux picture to be shown in Los Angeles and its Black Belt neighborhood, Central Avenue, first at the Tivoli in June 1934, then at the Rosebud as part of a double bill.

Yet things were slowing down. Micheaux's second Clarence Brooks vehicle never materialized. With his characteristic optimism, the race-picture pioneer announced a program of exciting new projects for the future, films that would continue to bring Southern and Northern experiences together into the same story, “a mixture of the old and new Negro.” He intended to create race pictures that would be welcomed by “capacity houses in Dixieland as well as on Broadway.”

But the talk of Broadway was a flash of the old bravado, when in truth Micheaux had begun to lower his expectations. Race pictures, even he recognized, were an endangered species.

By the mid-1930s it was obvious that the New Deal was the same old Bad Deal for black Americans, who still bore widespread unemployment, dwelled in inferior housing, and got the worst of every social index, including the nation's highest mortality rate. North and South, they endured nearly universal discrimination and led generally downtrodden lives.

In Harlem there was growing unrest over the soured promise of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's reforms. The bitterness peaked in March 1935 with a riot. Following rumors that a black youth, accused of stealing a knife from a store, had been beaten by police, some ten thousand Harlemites went on a rampage, looting and destroying neighborhood businesses. Often enough the targets were Jews, who were among Harlem's chief landlords and merchants. Before the National Guard could quell the disturbance, three black citizens had been killed and seventy-five people (mostly black) arrested; property damages soared above $200,000.

Many Harlemites, including many theater and music artists, were politicized by the Depression at home, and by the rise of fascism abroad. Some found an outlet for their activism as members of the U.S. branch of the Communist Party. A small number were drawn to Nazism and Hitler. Indeed, during this time Harlem produced a homegrown “Black Hitler,” the fiery labor and religious leader Sufi Abdul Hamid, whose streetcorner harangues decrying the millions of dollars poured into white businesses in Harlem were suffused with anti-Semitism. A convert to Islam, Abdul Hamid brought thousands of Harlemites into the Islamic faith and led a
controversial boycott of Harlem merchants, before he was sued, dragged into court, and jailed. In 1937, he was killed in an airplane crash.

As the mood of black America swung from lassitude and despair to a heightened pride and militance—especially in the Northern cities—there was one surprising side effect: the race picture industry caught a second wind. Film scholar Clyde Taylor has described the mid-to late 1930s as a resurgent period for race pictures, one that saw an escalation in both quality and quantity. Even as the term “colored” gave way to “Negro” in general parlance, “about this time the very name ‘race movies' began to disappear,” wrote Taylor. Some called them “sepia pictures” now.

In the mid-1930s, Hollywood itself gave rise to a flurry of new pictures geared to black audiences. They were modest films, arguable advances, but the times were calling for change, and Hollywood took note. The major studios always had followed the race-picture business, coveting its talent, its ideas, its audience.

One of the Hollywood breakthroughs, for example, was a “passing” story given the four-handkerchief treatment.
Imitation of Life,
made in 1934, starred Louise Beavers as a self-sacrificing “Mammy” whose light-skinned daughter is tormented by her racial identity. Its undeniable success spurred a few “all-Negro” projects, like the screen version of
The Green Pastures
in 1936. Unique personalities like the dumb-comic Stepin Fetchit and dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson suddenly became Hollywood royalty, given marquee roles in major studio productions.

Most of the new “sepia pictures” were also being made in Hollywood, but on the fringe, where shoestring producers, often white Jewish men who were aloof from the big studios, cranked out formulaic all-black programmers for predominantly black audiences. Not bad films, either: Light-skinned Ralph Cooper, disqualified as a “typical Negro” for Hollywood roles, became a crime-buster in a slew of “sepia pictures,” while a former jazz crooner named Herb Jeffries metamorphosed into a singing cowboy and single-handedly revived the all-black Western.

Outside of Hollywood, only a few lonely outposts of race picture-making endured. One was in Dallas, where Spencer Williams, a stocky, resourceful actor who had dabbled in writing and directing motion pictures, often without credit, since the silent era, was turning out interesting all-black films for Sack Amusement Enterprises.

Always a category unto himself, Micheaux remained in the East long after his many rivals and colleagues in the field had quit, or gone to Hol
lywood. The leading name in race pictures (he was slow to embrace the term “sepia”) still made his home in Harlem. But Micheaux and Spencer Williams shared an angel: the Jewish Texan Alfred N. Sack, who helped give Micheaux's career rare stability through much of the 1930s.

 

Like Micheaux, Alfred N. Sack was a born salesman. The son of a Greenville, Mississippi, merchant, he moved with his family to San Antonio as a boy. After high school, Alfred tried college in St. Louis before returning to San Antonio, where he published the local
Jewish Record.
As an officer of his temple, he hosted amateur plays and road shows, and it was there that he fell in love with show business.

Sack bought his first theater in San Antonio in 1920, when he was only twenty years old. He and his brother Lester soon began buying other movie houses in the South and Southwest, often in Mexican or black neighborhoods, and by 1922 they had theaters in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The Sack theaters offered race pictures and touring plays, but the brothers also cultivated civic relations by making the theaters available to local “colored” clubs, sororities, fraternities, and charitable organizations. By the mid-1920s Alfred Sack was putting money into the occasional low-budget Spanish-speaking, Yiddish, all-black, or educational picture. In 1929 he produced
St. Louis Blues,
a musical short with blues singer Bessie Smith, shot in New York City.

The bespectacled Sack was very much a Southerner—soft-spoken, laidback, courtly. He didn't pretend to be a creative producer; rather, he was an investor in the creativity of others, and a salesman of the product. Like Micheaux, he made it a point of honor to travel his circuit, which included much of the Deep South and Southwest, getting to know the theater managers and making good on his agreements.

Moving to Dallas in 1936, Sack decided to expand his operations, adding theaters and boosting his investment in race-picture production. He signed distribution contracts with every producer he could find, and handled the “sepia pictures” of most of the newest Hollywood companies. He opened branch offices of Sack Amusement Enterprises in Chicago, Atlanta, and on Seventh Avenue in New York. His press releases vowed to book future Micheaux productions into white theaters. For the first time, he created color brochures and even trailers for upcoming
Micheaux titles. And, as another point of honor, the Sack firm hired “an increased number of colored assistants, agents, and other attachés.”

The budgets for Micheaux's productions were still stingy: Regardless of the Depression, the filmmaker was still held to a $15,000 limit—the same amount he had budgeted for his first silent picture,
The Homesteader,
in 1918. His stars might earn $100 to $500 per picture, but most of the other actors were paid ten dollars a day. (Even so, actors' salaries added up to less than 10 percent of the total budget.)

But the Sack money was steady and reliable, and Micheaux could get his movies pre-booked into the company's string of black theaters in the South and Southwest. Sack even took care of Micheaux's distribution problems in Harlem and elsewhere in the boroughs of New York City, by making local exhibition arrangements with the RKO chain.

In his publicity materials, Micheaux acknowledged that times had changed, while slyly clinging to ideas that had worked for him so often in the past. No longer would audiences tolerate “Southern hymn singing and portraying of Mammys with handkerchiefs on their heads,” he was quoted as saying. The changing times called for modern race dramas, urban and edgy and suffused with “a faster tempo, night clubs, hot orchestras, pretty chorus girls.” The most marked change would be in the number of white actors Micheaux intended to sprinkle into small parts (“not as buffoons as we are used in Hollywood,” as he explained, “but in exactly the same spirit we would like them to use us”), and in the new orchestras and floor shows he would use, sometimes drawing the performers, now, from midtown clubs.

Micheaux's new race dramas would be set in Harlem or Chicago, or sometimes—like
Temptation,
the first film he officially produced under the Sack umbrella—both in the same story.

 

Temptation
was shot in mid-1936. The film itself is “lost,” but its plotline can be pieced together from press notices: A beautiful young Chicagoan wanders into a notorious nightclub and finds herself in deep trouble, getting mixed up with a gangster on the lam from Harlem. A government agent rescues her in the nick of time. It was the usual Micheaux setup, except for this extraordinary fillip: the girl is an artist's model (“with the fig
ure of a goddess”), accustomed to posing in the nude. The men she meets just don't understand the artistic nature of her profession.

Micheaux needed a handsome actor to play the undercover agent, but he was fresh out of leading men. Lorenzo Tucker had gotten married and quit acting in favor of a regular paycheck, starting a painting and home improvement business on Long Island. He still stayed in touch with Micheaux, who treated him like a wayward son. “I used to go to their house some evenings,” Tucker recalled, “and I was actually hungry between pictures, because things were tough in those days. I used to sit down at the table, and eat with them. Incidentally, I was accused of eating up all the props when we made the pictures and we had dining room scenes…” Micheaux offered Tucker the undercover agent role.

Then he went after another regular who had left acting behind: Andrew Bishop had moved to Cleveland, where he worked for the city administration. Bishop's successful shady-character turn in
Lem Hawkins' Confession
inspired Micheaux to think of him for the gangster-louse in
Temptation.
After a series of phone calls and letters, Micheaux managed to woo Bishop away from Cleveland, and the filming was arranged around his August summer vacation. Bishop drove East in the new Hudson he had bought on his city salary.

The mood was more lighthearted on the sets of the films Micheaux made for Sack Amusement Enterprises in the mid-1930s. Having been through the worst, Micheaux had come to see his job more philosophically. Many of the actors seemed to realize that it was the last hurrah for race pictures, and there was a kind of “Let's enjoy ourselves while we can” atmosphere on the set, an echo of the “family feeling” that had prevailed during Micheaux's time in Roanoke. Now and then Micheaux played practical jokes on the cast members, and they took their revenge with elaborate spring-traps of their own. When he wasn't looking, they even did hilarious impressions of him, mocking his pompous pronouncements.

Micheaux felt, sometimes, that there was a little too much fun going on. “The big problem is getting these artists to work in the morning,” he complained in one interview. “High-priced technical men must frequently be paid for hours while some person necessary to a scene is quietly snoozing at home after a night's jamboree. Things like this run the cost of production up.”

Tucker and Bishop, especially, made a “pair of wastrels” during the film
ing of
Temptation.
More than once they materialized late, or inebriated. One day the friends fell to drinking together in Harlem, and then got into a car accident while crossing the George Washington Bridge on their way to Fort Lee. By the time they finally arrived at the studio, an angry Micheaux had already started without them. The two curled up behind some flats, thinking it might be wise to avoid the boss until they had sobered up.

“Where the hell have you been?” Micheaux demanded when they eventually crawled out.

Bishop muttered something about falling asleep behind the flats.

“Micheaux didn't believe us,” recalled Tucker, “and he never forgave us for that one.”

The nude artist's model was the most important character in the story, and once again Micheaux had to mold a novice into a marquee attraction. He chose Ethel Moses, a newcomer to the screen with sultry, Latin-tinged looks, who had va-va-voom to spare. The daughter of a minister, Moses had been a chorine with Florence Mills and won a Harlem beauty contest that broadcast her vital statistics: height: 5'4½", bust: 32, waist: 27, hips: 37. She had performed in cabarets and road shows. Micheaux promoted Moses as “The Negro Harlow,” and advertised
Temptation
as “Adults Only” in some venues, with pinups of Moses half-nude from behind, or cupping her bare breasts.

The film's nudity might have hampered it in states with vigilant censors, but
Temptation
circulated well in Sack theaters; and in the East, Moses made personal appearances at the largest venues. One such event, at Brooklyn's Regent Theatre in April 1938, reportedly drew five thousand people. After the Micheaux picture was shown, hundreds rushed backstage for autographs and police had to be summoned.

 

With Alfred Sack's money behind him, Micheaux was back up to speed. His next film,
Underworld,
was shot the same year, in late 1936.

Once again Micheaux chose Chicago as the main setting for a story about humble, decent folk who get mixed up with jazz and low-life criminals. This time, however, Micheaux based his script on someone else's story: “Chicago After Midnight” by Edna Mae Baker, who wrote for
Abbott's Monthly,
a literary offshoot of the
Chicago Defender.

The story began “somewhere in the Southland,” with establishing
shots of Fisk University in Nashville, where a new graduate (Sol Johnson) is invited to Chicago by a smooth-talking racketeer (Alfred “Slick” Chester), hiding out from police. The two descend on the Black Belt, and the graduate loses himself (and his money) in a binge of crap games, speakeasies, and pawnshops. He develops a crush on a vamp (Bee Freeman) who is already juggling two men—the racketeer and an abusive husband (Oscar Polk).